lpah4all

Shouldn't their 5-year warranty drives still be good?

My favorite idiom comes from China: Pay a lot, cry once.

If I need to explain to you how we know that the Earth is not flat, then I should just end this conver

That's not who the OP was talking about, not-Einstein. He's talking about the idiots who idiotically polarize needed conversations that need nuance. a-hem

We're not talking about medical experts here.

The problem is that the only organizations wealthy enough to do the necessary tests to provide "proof" have ZERO motivation to do anything that could jeopardize their already flowing coffers.

I mean, the govt could do it, if they weren't in the pockets of the corps.

What I'm saying is that if you're waiting for the pharma corps to provide the necessary studies to show their products ineffective or even dangerous, I'd call you a fool. Or do you have a few billion dollars lying around to fund such studies?

Honest, capable people don't put words in other people's mouths.

Please show me where I said, "All of medicine is therefore bad." No, you said that.

Now, will you apologize? I doubt it.

Will you do better at reading and understanding in the future? I sincerely hope so.

There's nothing more tedious than someone who cites an argument fallacy incorrectly.

Regulatory capture and goal-seeking driven by profit-seeking B-school acolytes.

But when the consensus is based upon for-profit goal-seeking corps that have engaged in successful regulatory capture, it is your duty to question it.

Why, pray tell, are the US's vax schedules so heavy compared to Europe? Are all their doctors quacks are is our medical system bought-and-sold by B-schoolers?

I know the answer and I doubt you're willing to even entertain the truth much less accept it. But I'd love to be wrong about that.

My wife's son is a doctor. He said he wouldn't go to 80% of his fellow med school graduates for care. Being good at memorizing does not make one a good doctor, even though it's essential.

Depends on the doctor, depends on the situation.

I did, you should note, get told not to come back to a doctor's group -- after a single visit to establish a PCP -- for quote "asking too many questions".

My wife was with me and was confused because I was in no way belligerent. And, for sure, that doctor was a piece of work. She just wanted to go through her checklist and be done with it, and her attitude showed.

You got it.

It takes intelligence to entertain both sides of an argument, grasp and appreciate the nuance of the situation and then come to a sensible conclusion, which is often "I don't know, I'll need to learn more to decide."

And it takes intellectual honesty to admit when our preconceptions need to be tossed and upgraded to a more expansive, more accurate worldview, which is the essense of intelligence.

That's why Dunning & Kruger's work is so damned important: It showed that the least capable are the most confident.

Uhh, google "opioid epidemic".

Or, perhaps "cancer-causing agents in prescription drugs" (caused by not testing their processes for unwanted by-products making their way into the medicines).

Or, that airbag manufacturer or the car manufacturers who don't provide a safety feature because the bean counters declare that so long as there are less than ten successful lawsuits, the profit will be more if they leave it out, no matter how many people die in the process. Google "Goodyear RV tires".

Or the disaster in Bhopal India.

What about these piles of mercury-laden coal ash piled next to our river because of the coal-burning plant next to it?

And you think the pesticide producers are not cherry-picking their researchers to goal-seek?

Now, do your research.

>> The people who are producing vaccines don't typically make tons of profit on them.

You have not done your research.

>> Are you a stupid mark for trusting the regulatory system that ensures safety?

Why do you assume I trust them? I damn sure didn't say it.

In theory gov't would regulate pharma corps. How's that working out for the opioids?

You should read Dunning & Kruger, you're not in the group you think you are, and I know which group you're in.

Then you should read my post again, this time for comprehension.

Smart people are loathe to trust for-profit corps with their health.

How safe do you find those opioids now? What were they saying in front of the congressional committee? What were their sales reps saying? What were their privately-funded goal-seeking researchers saying?

Medical science and profit should not be mixed. I mean, look at this mess here in America.

It's difficult to mandate self-evolution through education. Most people just binge-watch vapid fiction after vapid fiction.

Your biases are so ingrained you don't even realize them.

Yes, I am biased against for-profit corps. Which one, especially among the pharmas, do you trust?

No, this is not my gut, this is my experience with for-profit corps and my knowing their past and recent history.

And you say there is something wrong with my message, but you did not state one single fact to argue. You are the one arguing from your gut and your belief that our govt and for-profit corps give a shit about anything other than your money. They only care that you can't prove the tort.

And who said I trust governments? You did. I didn't say that shit. I said our government should run these programs, but what I didn't say was that we need governments made up of actual "public servants", not the corrupt, self-dealing lying pieces of shit that take a boatload of money from corps of all kinds, the bigger the cozier.

Your thinking you are so smart is getting in the way of your education.

No, you can only be forced into quarantine if you have a communicable disease.

And the immuno-compromise put themselves at risk every time they go out without a mask.

Now, are you also going to require older people to top-up their vaccinations? You know they lose efficacy over time, right?

Most people are fascists at heart, more than willing to control your body over their own fears and stupidities.

We each get to choose what to do with our bodies so long as we are not intentionally causing harm to others.

Most people won't accept this, thus we shall both be downvoted to oblivion by the ignorant and oppressive.

The use of thimerosol is solely to increase shelf-life. Keeping stock from expiring (thus being unsellable) is a fundamental B-school technique for controlling costs.

Anyone with any knowledge of human physiology knows injecting any form of mercury into the blood of newborns and the pregnant is insane. There is no more toxic element than mercury.

And hand-picked and funded goal-seeking researchers are not hard to find, if you've been following the "reproducibility problem" these past few years.

They don't care so long as you can't prove the tort.

It also increases profit.

You trust those B-schoolers and their hand-picked goal-seeking researchers to shade toward safety or profit?

I am pro-vax (within a sensible schedule) and anti-for-profit-corps, who NEVER EVER give a shit about your health, only that you can't prove that it was their product that harmed you.

Vaccines are an absolutely revolutionary technology.

That said, mixing profit with essential medical technology is a recipe for failure.

The first way to make something more profitable is to cut costs.

What corners do these corps cut to up their margins? And how does that decrease health outcomes for some percent of the population?

The bottom-line is that no for-profit corp can be trusted with your health.

Vaccines must be developed and distributed by the government for the benefit of all human beings. Sure, we need to minimize cost but not to enrich the select few wealthy enough to be investors in the first place. If there is a surplus (profit), that money gets invested right back into R&D. No pharma-bros needed or wanted.

I am pro-vaccine and anti-for-profit-corps.

Yes, my kids are vaxed for measles and a few others, but, no, I did not go in for the entire schedule, which is frankly insane. Just compare our vax schedule in America to what they do in Europe. It's maybe 2x. And, yes, we will all get a Covid vax as soon as it is available.

But, remember, selling three of something (ETA: instead of two) that has a little margin gives you a 50% increase in profit. B-School types don't care that that third dose might be too much; besides, they can find/fund researchers to goal-seek safety for that extra 50%.

And, yes, vax is big business, just not as big as other meds.

And, yes, anti-vaxxers piss me off, too, the fucking anti-science morons. But people who trust for-profit corps with their health are stupid marks.

>> I don't know what exactly contributes to this

Proper mental models, tool mastery, love for hyperfocus, brutality of testing, passion for solving interesting, difficult problems, along with the proper work environment involving a proper problem.

The same could be said for Andrew Wiles' process of solving Fermat's Last Theorem, tho in a vastly different arena.

If I had to nail it down to a single characteristic, it would be obsessive tenacity in the pursuit of a high standard of craftsmanship. From that, all else comes with time.

What one values in life is the basis of mental health, unless one has a physical pathology (e.g. depression).

Congratulations on your success. There is a significant part of the world population that refuse to learn how to look at the world as appreciatively as we do. The struggles my wife and I have faced throughout our lives give us the foundation for the joy and inner peace we feel in our lives.

I know there will be a lot of people that are suffering during this through no fault of their own, and I hope they persevere and that they reach out to their communities for caring help, and that they receive it.

But a significant percent of us in the wealthier countries of the world are simply having to adjust to not being able to trod all over the world giving fuck-all about anyone else. I say it's well and truly time for them to appreciate their grocery clerks and hospital orderlies and realize that all people are valuable and that the more they struggle in life, the more we should help.

Personally, I'm very happy with the improvement in air quality from the reduction in society's busyness. Endless growth of GDP was always setting us up for disaster; this seems like a kindof gentle way (if brutally abrupt) to slow down our economies, but we'll see how/if/when we come out of the other side.

Josh Marshall and his team at TalkingPointsMemo have been doing a fantastic job for these past four years documenting Trump's AG turnstile that finally landed him the cover-up artist Barr, whose lawyering for government criminals goes back to the Reagan administration. And that man is good at what he does, for he has no shame; it's team-first and damn the Constitution.

And at some point, it no longer became reductionist to call Nixon a criminal. His AG ended up doing 19 months, and that was nothing compared to what these mofos are doing.

Also, h/t to Marcy Wheeler at emptywheel.net for her fine reporting on the transgressions of the Trump administration.

Who the fuck would downvote this?

It is established fact.

Oh, that's right. It's 2020 and the Internet has no shortage of ideological idiots and information saboteurs. Talk about a thorny problem for a board like this.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but words have meaning and, as a father-to-son Scotsman, I'm pretty fucking sure that a Scotsman has to have some branch of their ancestry come from Scotland.

Also, a priest can't honestly say they love you and serve Jesus if they're raping your children in the back room.

There is truth and there are lies and falsehoods. Nuance is required to discern between them. Most people are just too intellectually lazy to even try. That ignorance leads to many of the systemic problems of our world, not the least of which are religious groups like ISIS/ISIL and the Catholic Church deceiving people with their lies, hypocrisies and oppressions.

Dunning & Kruger, dude. I know where you land on the chart, and I know that you don't know where you land yet think you do.

Well, RS certainly prepared him for how to deal with the patient dying.

I'm sure he tried to save my beloved RS, too.

I remember reading a Rolling Stone article years ago about neurosurgery residents (7 years) where one of the guys lost something like his first 17 patients on the table (because they're all cases like anyeurisms). He stuck with it and, one night, placed the clamp in a pool of blood to within a mm of perfection to close the bleed. Their training was: learn a procedure, do a procedure.

I am grateful that people like yourselves undergo the arduous process to become an MD.

Good luck and thanks!

Every person is a door to your happiness, and you have the choice to serve their happiness or to treat them callously or even cruelly.

There is no religion without the person actively trying to be a better person to every single person around them. It doesn't matter what spiritual practices they do or don't do, we are each measured by our hearts with respect to how we treat every person we encounter.

Religion's only goal is to get us to work together cooperatively across all divisions of humanity (from form of religion, to gender identification or sexual preference, to ethnicity or culture) to create caring, accepting societies. Right now, our world's state is the result of our societies being based on competition. That is why there are so many destitute homeless people. The system itself doesn't give a shit about them because the system itself only cares about money.

And this is all the result of human making choices based upon their selfish desires, humans in their packs taking as much as they can for themselves while callously ignoring out-group members. That is not human, and is literally inhumane. For that same society to produce Jeff Bezos demonstrates its brokenness that is also its design.

The problem is that the vast majority of so-called religious folks are only doing so to be a member of the alpha group, instead of being interested in how they can be a better member of a better, all-inclusive society. We have mammalian bodies and those structures inform our potentials. To be human is to rise above that animal heredity and embrace the virtues of humanity: caring, active, effortful compassion being essential.

This is why a prominent Rabbi spoke at Muhammed Ali's funeral. They were both Men of God who spread love and unity amongst and between their different cultures. Anywhere you find universal love and respect for all others, you find God's Religion, whichever form it takes in its society.

And legion are those that selfishly deceive in the name of religion or even try to create their own religions. The child rapist Catholic Priest does not denigrate the Message of Love present in Jesus' form of God's Religion; he only proves his perfidy and that of the organization that hides his sins and felonies from his prey's society.

The universe exists to give us the opportunity to be selfless caregivers for our fellow human beings or be callous or even predatory towards those we deem "other" or "lesser". This why we each are born with a sense of morality, however molded from culture to culture and manifest from person to person, except in the rare cases of people, like Lee, that have physical pathologies that hinder it.

The non-pathological of us each have the free will to choose to self-evolve ourselves during our lives towards greater compassion for all those around ourselves, or to selfishly gather as much material pleasure as we can for ourselves regardless of the cost to others, be it monetary, emotional, or physical.

We are all actively evolving ourselves every day of our lives, for better or worse, even if all it amounts to is repetitively strengthening one's already accepted habits and attitudes. The exception being when disease or tragedy takes away our ability to rationally choose, as happens with people such as Lee. That is where compassion from our fellow human beings is part of the potential we must each welcome, for such is the moral requirement of being a human being.

We have been given what is both a great gift and a great responsibility with our free will and the mind required to learn and wield it justly and for the benefit of the whole and not just some preferred sub-group.

God is not a white man (full-disclosure: white guy here); It didn't give us free will only to then take it back from us because that means we can become, for example, callous, self-serving, corrupt, power-seeking, hypocritical fake-Christian deceivers of men.

No. The polarity of our morality extends to whichever direction the person can imagine. That is why we are both treasured above all creation and capable of the most brutal of atrocities.

We are free to be good or evil and that means we are also free to not give a fuck.

The same guy who told Frost, "Well, if the President did it, it's not illegal."

Clearly, his grip on reality was a long time gone in service to his power-seeking for his constituency.

Even a president can be a data point in Dunning & Kruger's "too stupid to know how stupid they are" category.

Now, we have a mobbed-up slumlord 1000x more stupid and infinitely more amoral. He is a true credit to the GOP's fundamental guiding principles.